These women had come back from the first mechanised war with a mastery of machines. ‘God knows I’m a damn good driver,’ Joe said. The X Garage brochure explained that thanks to their wartime experiences the drivers were familiar with the countryside of Ireland, Great Britain, France and Belgium, and that they spoke French, Italian and German. (Bardie and Molly had presumably acquired their languages in finishing school rather than on the battlefield.) The girls took tourists on expeditions to Imperial War Graves cemeteries in France and Belgium, happily profiting from the memorials to the men who had made way for them. They also offered touring holidays to Ireland, Wales and the Lake District, Devon and Cornwall and the Scottish lochs. The 1,700-mile tour of Ireland took twenty days and cost £134, to cover all expenses for five passengers, including accommodation.
The girls were prepared to take on any driving work, far or near. Bardie and Joan enlisted the hall porters at prestigious London hotels as agents, promising a ten per cent commission on any work put their way. The Savoy proved especially lucrative, and the X Garage cars were frequently booked to pick up parties from the theatre. At four o’clock one afternoon a cable arrived requesting that an American family be met in Naples in less than a week’s time; by 5.30 p.m. Bardie Coleclough was on the road in a Daimler. When she reached Naples, Bardie discovered that the Americans’ child refused to sit in the car for long periods, so the family travelled between cities by train and Bardie drove ahead to meet them at each stop on their itinerary.
The women delighted in the absurdities and surprises their work threw up. When interviewed by the press they told merry anecdotes about their adventures. One of the girls drove an eccentric American and his secretary on a six-month journey through France, Spain and Morocco to Tunisia. The man announced he would change his collar only when he reached a certain page of his book, and stuck to his guns even when it became apparent that the journey was far too chaotic for sustained reading. The chaos sprang partly from the fact that many of the landmarks picked out in their ancient Baedeker had been destroyed in the war, and partly from the American’s complicated superstitions: in the third week of the month, for instance, he insisted on finding a large hotel so that he could book into room 333, while in the fourth week he favoured room 444.
A party of miners from South Wales regularly booked two X Garage cars to take them on their annual trip to the Derby. The miners saved up all year for this treat, for which they hired suits from Moss Bros. A waiter from the Savoy accompanied the group and served a sumptuous lunch of salmon mayonnaise, wine, chicken, strawberries and cream, which the chauffeuses were invited to share.
The X Garage had illustrious clients, among them James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, and the Sultan of Perak. When the Sultan and his unofficial wife visited England, the X Garage girls drove them to all their engagements, including a lunch at St James’s Palace with the Prince of Wales. The Sultan gave his drivers silver cigarette cases and placed an order with them for a Minerva car, a present for the Rajah Premaseri. He specified that he wanted it repainted in bright violet, hung with violet satin curtains, and emblazoned on the door with his crest, as big as a dinnerplate, in green and gold. As a final booking, he asked Joan to drive his new polo ponies to Marseilles.
The novelty of female drivers was such that passengers were often confused as to whether to treat their chauffeuses as servants or equals. Sometimes a driver would be shown to the drawing-room when she turned up to collect her charges, sometimes to the kitchen. One driver took a party on a picnic, and was offered no share in the food until a custard tart was blown into the road. The hostess picked up the tart, dusted it off and passed it to the chauffeuse: ‘You won’t mind this,’ she said, ‘will you, dear?’
This confusion of status appealed to Joe. She was a woman in the guise of a man, an heiress in the guise of a servant: such ambiguities not only played to her sense of theatre, they were also tools to disconcert and outwit. Behind the wheel of a car, she was at the service of her customers and yet in control of them, literally in the driving seat. And though she and her fellow drivers were to some extent biddable, they also had an independence which the grand ladies they drove about could only dream of. Newspapers pictured the garage girls in oil-stained boiler suits, grinning as they changed tyres and burrowed in engines. They told the press that they had decided to employ no men: ‘After employing both men and girls,’ said Joan Mackern, ‘we have found that the girls are much more adaptable and trustworthy.’
In the early 1920s such remarks were reported in the press with fairly good humour – these women, war workers after all, were admired as spirited modern girls. Because of the war there were almost two million more women than men in Britain and it seemed natural that some of these ‘superfluous women’, hard-pressed to find husbands, would try their hand at traditionally male jobs. But within a few years the bold new girls bred by the Great War were to excite anxiety and fear.
For herself Joe bought a two-cylinder Triumph, in which she and Bardie sped round Devon and Cornwall; a Sunbeam, in which they took a trip to Sicily; and four silver-grey Rolls-Royces – a flashier, more modern make than a Daimler. In the South of France Joe would get drunk with her half-brother, Frank, with whom she enjoyed a rivalrous camaraderie, and race her Rolls against his. Sixty years later Bardie remembered Joe as she was then, ‘sparkling, gay and crazy’.
Cars provided the danger on which Joe thrived. She liked to tell stories of charmed escapes from death. On a rainy night in London in 1921 she and her friends were returning from a party when the driver of their car fell asleep and crashed into a streetlamp outside the Brompton Oratory. Joan, knocked unconscious, vomited on her pale blue evening gown. Molly and Bardie were admitted to hospital with minor injuries and shock. Joe, though badly cut with glass, refused to get into an ambulance and stumbled away bleeding profusely from her limbs and belly. Once home she telephoned her paediatrician, by then a retired doctor of eighty-four, and asked him to come to her aid. ‘He came blowing up the stairs,’ said Joe, ‘and by an electric light in the garage he stitched me up.’ He then ordered her to go to a nursing home for two weeks and drink steak blood.
In the early 1920s Joe lived on a secluded estate, at once rugged and luxurious, near the Coleclough farm in Hampshire. Here she converted two disused army huts into a large bungalow which she named Bostwick, after her mother’s family. Bostwick foreshadowed the cloistered world she was to create in the Bahamas. In the living-room was a wide window looking out over the sea and the Isle of Wight. Joe had an orchard and fruit walks planted, and a huge rockery laid. She built stables, garages, a tennis court, a croquet lawn, a swimming-pool and guest houses linked by a private telephone system. To service her estate, Joe employed a large staff, including a chauffeur, grooms and seven gardeners.
When Bardie Coleclough brought her nephew and niece on a visit, Joe gave miniature mechanical cars to the boy and dolls to the girl; both children played with a mechanical boat in the pool. Joe too played with boats. Her first was Sonia, a magnificent yacht which she referred to admiringly as ‘a real terrible girl’. Joe was soon an equally magnificent yachtswoman – she won one race at Harwich despite falling overboard half-way through – and in 1924 Sonia took almost every cup in her class.
That year, Joe became even richer. Both Nellie’s and Evelyn’s wills, which had been subject to three years of litigation, were finally settled. Evelyn’s will had been contested by her second and fourth husbands, Francis Francis Sr and Serge Voronoff, and by Joe. Evelyn had left her personal effects to Joe and all the income from the residue of the estate to Voronoff, to pass to Joe on his death. Joe claimed that she was entitled in addition to stock set apart by her mother as a marriage settlement. Francis and Voronoff argued that since Joe’s marriage to Jacques de Pret had been annulled in 1921 this settlement was invalid. (Presumably Joe had delayed annulling her marriage until after her mother died, precisely so that Evelyn would not withdraw the settlement.) Francis also insisted that
his children, Sally and Francis Jr, were entitled to half the estate. The compromise reached in 1924 was that Joe would receive the marriage settlement, Voronoff would receive his income (about $325,000 a year), and on his death it would be shared between Joe, Sally and Frank. In the same year Joe came into the large fund established for her in Nellie Bostwick’s will.
Joe could now afford to marry her two loves – machines and the sea. In 1925 she used her new riches to commission the best motorboat money could buy.
Chapter Six
The Water when One Hits it
Before motor-power, boats had ploughed through the sea, their brute force cleaving a passage by displacing their weight in water. With the invention of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century it became possible to attain much greater speeds by lifting a craft clear of the mass of water, so that it skimmed rather than furrowed. The first successful boats of this type, known as hydroplanes, were introduced in the first years of the twentieth century. Hydroplanes were designed with sharply planed surfaces – or steps – on the bottom of the hull, which at once concentrated the pressure of water on the base, propelling the craft upwards, and sliced the water away from the boat’s sides. These long, lean boats were inefficient at low speed but when run fast their hulls climbed to the surface and surfed like pebbles flung across the water.
Hydroplanes were not only faster than conventional boats but also more dangerous. The water hammered on their flattened bottoms, weakening the wood; when one early hydroplane hit a wave its engine broke clean through the hull and sank. The boats could be capsized by a small swell or the wake of a passing craft. In their flight across a river or lake they could swiftly spin out of control. As these boats became more sophisticated they became more wayward, more mercurial. At a motorboat race in the early 1920s a hydroplane caught in the wash of a tugboat sheered wildly off course and crashed into a stone breakwater, which it then proceeded to climb; at the top of the breakwater it took the leg off a boy who was watching the race. Like the island to which Joe Carstairs was later to devote herself, these new craft were essentially inanimate and yet seemed to contain a vital force, seemed possessed of independent life. Though Joe always referred to boats, cars and the island as ‘she’, as female entities, she perceived them as virile and wilful. ‘I liked the boats,’ she said later. ‘I liked the way they behaved. I understood them.’
Joe entrusted the design of her hydroplane to Samuel Saunders, the head of the celebrated boat-building firm in East Cowes on the Isle of Wight. In the 1890s Sam Saunders had invented the revolutionary Consuta method of hull-construction, by which moulded wood was backed with oiled fabric and sewn together with copper wire. Saunders built the most successful boat of 1913, the last boat-racing season before the war. The same year his much-loved daughter and assistant, Ethel, died of meningitis aged thirty-four. She was buried in a mahogany coffin of Consuta construction, shaped like a lifeboat, sewn in silver wire and painted white.
Motorboat-racing resumed in 1920 but high-speed boats were so expensive that only a few were commissioned each year, and a successful craft could bring a boatyard great prestige. Joe Carstairs’ boat was one of two built by the Saunders yard in 1925. The brilliant young designer Fred Cooper was set to work on it; Sam Saunders supervised the construction.
Joe sat in the Saunders yard in East Cowes to watch the finishing touches to her craft, a seventeen-foot, 1.5-litre or ‘Z’-class hydroplane with a shallow hull. The boat’s wood was so thin and pliant that it gave when pushed, and bulged in the water with every wave. She was painted gloss black with a single white stripe running her length. To give her extra lift and buoyancy, dozens of inflated pigs’ bladders were stowed under the deck. Joe named her Gwen, after the Variety star Gwen Farrar, a friend, a lover and an expert horsewoman.
In one of the test runs the boat capsized, and when she came up again Joe renamed her by reversing the letters of her name. Now she was Newg. By undergoing this ducking and rechristening the boat became a sister to Carstairs. The boat shared in her own renaming, just as Joe, on regaining consciousness after the fall from the camel in London Zoo, took a new name and became a different creature, inverted and strengthened.
Once the boat was launched Sam Saunders offered Joe Carstairs the services of his own chauffeur and mechanic, Joe Harris. The two Joes became devoted to one another, and Harris rode with Carstairs as her mechanic in almost all her races over the next five years. ‘My man was Joe Harris,’ was how she put it. She was already known as Joe by the time they met, and she enjoyed the match of names, producing race souvenirs inscribed: ‘ “Joe” and Joe’. The origin of her nickname is obscure but it is interesting that her father’s name – of which she claimed to have no knowledge – was Albert Joseph Carstairs.
Joe Carstairs was ready to point out that Joe Harris faced more danger than she during a race: when a motorboat crashed, the mechanic was hurled into the engine behind which he sat, while the pilot was buffered by the wheel. Both Joes were dark, small and stocky. Joe Harris, the shorter of the two, was altogether more crumpled and loose; his face was worn, his jackets were creased, his mouth turned down at the corners and his sweaters rucked in folds across his belly. Carstairs, like a well-fed schoolboy, had a full, smooth face, pressed jackets, regular features, and hair slicked firmly back on to her head. For the camera, she frowned a little, squared her shoulders, held a cigarette in one hand and placed the other in a jacket pocket. Joe Harris looked easy and baggy in his manhood; Joe Carstairs strained after hers. An apprentice mechanic in the Saunders yard recalled how greatly Carstairs cared for Joe Harris, and remarked that he was maybe like a father to her. She was proud of him, certainly. In one picture of the two together she stands ramrod-straight and links his arm possessively as he leans comfortably into her.
Harris was among the first of the scores of people Carstairs ‘looked after’. She provided him with an income in perpetuity; when he lost both legs in old age she travelled to England to be at his bedside; and when he died she continued to support his family. ‘Joe Harris, my mechanic, was always with me,’ she recalled in the 1990s. ‘A grand guy. He never accepted a job with anyone else. A very brave chap and a damned good mechanic.’
Newg won her first race on Southampton Water, and was then entered for a series of competitions at Cannes. Joe Carstairs drove down to Cannes from Paris through pelting rain in a Vauxhall capable of 120mph. She arrived in ‘a blue funk’ after seventeen-and-a-half hours, and though she and Joe Harris took Newg to victory in a 20km race they capsized in the next contest. Hydroplanes were more volatile in the sea than in rivers. They progressed by a series of jumps and even in small waves might sheer wildly, taking on gallons of water. Each time the hydroplane leapt into the air the throttle had to be closed, to prevent the engine racing and smashing the propeller shaft. If flotsam and jetsam broke open the delicate hulls, the boat could nose-dive to the seabed.
‘If you run into a head sea,’ Joe told a reporter for the Evening News, ‘you get a jar absolutely right through you. I can’t describe it; there’s nothing with which to compare it. It’s far worse than any electric shock.’ But she played down the danger, insisting that the discomfort of motorboating was much greater. ‘Why, at the end of a race you’re filthy,’ Joe said. ‘Spattered with oil, soaked through, and can’t hear a thing.’
Joe said that she chose motorboats over other racing machines because ‘you get a better idea of speed than in a car or anything else’. The Birmingham Post described motorboating as ‘par excellence the sport for the speed enthusiast’ – an aeroplane’s propellers, by contrast, ‘beating against the unresisting air . . . give one hardly any sensation of speed’. Racing a motorboat was a felt battle, a collision between sea and machine, and racers could be knocked unconscious if they were thrown into the water at speed. ‘The water when one hits it,’ said Joe, ‘is as hard as a marble floor.’ In her boat, Carstairs could live even harder and faster than she did on land.
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nbsp; In June, Joe Carstairs took part in the trials for the second ever Duke of York’s Trophy, already acknowledged as the leading motorboating event in Britain. The race had been instituted the previous year in an attempt to standardise the competition between boats, and all entrants were seventeen-foot, one-and-a-half-litre hydroplanes, known as ‘mosquitoes’ for the manner in which they buzzed across the water. The course consisted of four seven-and-a-half-mile laps of the Thames between Putney and Mortlake. The greatest danger in the race lay in rounding the buoys, where a misjudgement could result in driver and mechanic being thrown out of their craft and into the path of a rival boat.
The newspapers noted Joe’s arrival on the motorboating scene with wary, gently mocking admiration. ‘A new type of river girl made her appearance on Thames-side on Saturday,’ reported one. ‘Keen-eyed and close-shingled, with a costume approaching a man’s flannel lounge-suit, she stood, on the Surrey bank between Mortlake and Putney talking glibly of outboards, revolutions and baskets.’ Remarkably little was made of the novelty of a woman competing in the event, perhaps because no one knew what to make of Joe. Female competitors were so rare that no women’s races existed, and she always competed in an all-male field.
In the 1925 contest Joe Carstairs achieved the fastest time, 32.16 knots, in the second of four rounds (‘32 Knots in the Thames,’ ran the Daily Telegraph headline). But she lost her advantage in the next lap when weeds – a hazard of river-racing – got caught in Newg’s propeller. She was placed fifth. The trophy went to Captain Woolf Barnato in Ardendrun II.
Woolf Barnato, a diamond merchant and former heavyweight boxer, was one of the most charismatic figures in motorboating. He and Joe became great friends. ‘Babe’ Barnato’s romances with starlets of the London stage were much reported in glossy magazines. Joe, too, enjoyed dalliances with showgirls and actresses, though these of course were not reported in the press.
The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water Page 5